Nokia CTO: “It’s all about the applications”

At the Qt Developer Days conference this week, Nokia's CTO took the stage to …

At the Qt Developer Days event this week in San Francisco, Nokia CTO Rich Green discussed the value that applications bring to mobile devices and the role that the Qt toolkit will play in Nokia's mobile platform strategy. Qt will accelerate Nokia's own mobile application development and supply the third-party developer community with a unifying toolkit that will work across both of Nokia's mobile platforms.

Green says that having a rich platform simply isn't enough anymore. "It's all about the applications," Green told the audience. After the initial novelty of a new smartphone wears off, additional functionality delivered through third-party software can keep consumers engaged and continuously make the product feel fresh and exciting. To encourage the formation of a robust third-party software ecosystem, he said, the platform must provide a large and homogeneous installed base.

Green contends that Symbian handsets failed to deliver a large homogeneous installed base--despite shipping in enormous volume—because the platform suffered from too much fragmentation. Nokia is determined to avoid similar problems in the future as it advances its new platform strategy. Green describes the company's commitment to backwards and forwards compatibility as a kind of social contract between Nokia and its third-party developer community. He stressed Nokia's devotion to ensuring that third-party applications will continue running on new devices so that developer investment will carry forward.

Green also discussed the important role that Qt will play in bridging the gap between Symbian and MeeGo, the open source mobile operating systems that Nokia uses on its phones. Mobile Qt applications can support the two operating systems, meaning that third-party application developers won't have to write their software twice if they want to reach users of both platforms. It's not a write-once-run-anywhere scenario, however. Developers will still have to compile and package their applications separately for each platform and may have to make some minor changes to conform with platform-specific characteristics. MeeGo and Symbian won't be identical, Green explained, but the time required to port between them will be "extremely modest."

The packaging and deployment challenges can be mitigated by better tooling, an area where Nokia is putting a lot of effort. The company offers a remote build service for Symbian applications, for example, that will allow developers to upload their code for on-demand compilation. Nokia is also working hard to continue advancing Qt Creator, an integrated development environment that is tailored to simplify Qt programming. Green says that Nokia aims to deliver an industry-leading set of tools that will "exceed the best" of the development environments for mobile and desktop software development.

Nokia's growing commitment to Qt arrives at a time when the company's legacy Symbian platform is struggling to compete with more modern rivals. The Symbian Foundation's key hardware partners have all moved on to other operating systems, leaving Nokia as the last major Symbian smartphone vendor. Nokia's recent layoffs are said to have cut deep into the company's Symbian expertise, signaling a potential shift in focus towards the Linux-based MeeGo platform.

Rumors circulated recently that the Symbian Foundation was going to be closed down, but the organization appears to have more life left in it thanks to a grant of 22 million euros supplied by the European Commission and a coalition of European countries and corporations that believe the platform's survival is important to the region's technology industry.

Nokia's efforts to bring Qt to Symbian alongside the Symbian Foundation's ongoing modernization efforts could extend the lifespan of the aging mobile operating system. Nokia's commitment to Qt will also make it easier for the company to transition to broader use of MeeGo in its high-end smartphone lineup so that it isn't entirely dependent on Symbian.